If you're thinking about embarking on the journey of agiletransformation you should be clear about why you want to become agile. The goalof being agile is to handle change. How would you handle change which, by theway, is often of the unexpected variety? At the very least you would not fallapart and stop operating. However it would be more desirable that youcapitalize on it. As jazz trumpeter, Miles Davis, said, "There are nomistakes in jazz--only opportunities." If you're working in an environment in which everything isroutine, every... [More]

Healthcare is a complex industry requiring compliance with numerous regulations. With Agile practices focusing on frequent iterations and an emphasis on working software over comprehensive documentation, Some might question whether Agile can be effective in delivering software for such a complex environment. I recently watched a webcast that dispels any myths that Agile cannot work for healthcare. In the webcast, Kim Werner, Agile Coach from ATSC and Liz Parnell, Solution Design Manager from Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina... [More]

I'd like to welcome everyone to our new Agile Transformation Zone community. I say community ... right now, while there is some great initial content .. the community part is just getting started. It's like we've just built a brand new house and the family hasn't moved in. As we all know, just like a house is not a home, this community space is only a space. It's the people that make a community work. My experience with building communities over the last several years indicates that you need 2 types of members (actually, you can break... [More]

How do Agile practices impact IT operations? Agile practices can provide organizations with great benefits: more customer collaboration leading to a better overall product, a unified development team that is generally more productive, innovative and just plain happier and finally can help organizations deliver software/solutions faster than ever before, beating the competition leading to increased market share and at the end of the day increases revenue. But time to market is only as fast as the weakest link in the overall software delivery... [More]

In my struggles and learnings as a social business practitioner I occasionally deliver social media workshops to share my experiences and knowledge with others (well, at least have delivered two of those to date). So according to Jakob Nielsen , a user experience guru, the 90-9-1 rule prevails. The rule says that in most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action. The 1% can have a great impact on the 90% (for example, the hotels that... [More]

I ran across this article on Agile Learning that I wanted to share. Most organizations are still practicing waterfall techniques when it comes to learning. One of the reasons that we are wanting to build this Agile community is to create an agile learning environment ... for people wanting to learn agile practices ... in an agile way. Take a look at the following diagram and see where your organization falls.

If you haven't seen this yet ... it's worth the 4 minutes. As you can imagine, there are numerous stories behind this story. One of the goals of this community is to provide a space for people to have conversations around these type of stories. Get to know the people behind the story.

Note: Community members, I'll be adding Rational's Agile training courses so members can find the training they need. I'd encourage you to share any public training you'll be doing whether it's formal or informal. To do so just post the the community blog and add the tags ( ibmagile training course ), if your course will be web based add the tag ( web ) and finally if your course is free add the tag ( free ). Your courses will show up on an RSS feed I'm building for the Events and Training area in the zone (now in Beta). Course... [More]

Course Description: Disciplined agile software development employs certain principles and practices that enable development teams to quickly build and deploy high quality software products. An example of one agile practice is to establish the Product Owner role. The Agile philosophy is to approach the system under development as a holistic product, not a series of disparate projects. This course explores the responsibilities and expectations of the Product Owner role. You will learn how a Product Owner can infuse business priorities, goals,... [More]

As Darrel blogged the other day, learning Agile is key to a successful Agile transformation! We want you to share your public training with everyone in the zone! This is a call out to all partners, customers or anyone who might be providing training... Whether formal classroom training, an informal meetup, a seminar or even a web conference... Tell the community what you're up to! How do you get your training courses on the Agile Transformation community? Just post the the community blog and add the tags ( ibmagile training course ) , if... [More]

The IBM Quality Software Engineering group provides internal guidance to thousands of IBM Agile developers about best practices, tips and techniques. We are happy to share this tutorial with the community for free. Look for more tutorials in the future... In this tutorial Elizabeth Woodward, author of "A Practical Guide to Distributed Scrum," discusses key factors teams should consider when scaling their Agile practice. Click to view the tutorial

Join me (Matt Holitza) at Mile High Agile on April 3rd in Denver, Colorado. This is the first year we are sponsoring the conference, and the good news for me is I only have to drive a few minutes to get there... We'll be talking to the Agile practitioners in Denver about the new Agile Transformation community and hopefully get a few hundred more members! To get more information or to register click here.

Innovate 2012 is the premiere Software Development Conference and this year it is going to be even more exciting as IBM Rational has a dedicated Agile Track with 21 sessions and there are an additional19 agile specialty sessions that are in our other tracks, such as Continuous Integration in our Quality Track. Learn more ... We will have some of the best Agile thought leaders in attendance, such as Mary Poppendieck, Scott Ambler, Elizabeth Woodward, Scott Rich and more. You will get a chance to speak to our developers and... [More]

....and then there was this time I deployed Rational ClearQuest across 30 change management processes 15 organizations 6 subcontractors <Names and places are changed to protect the innocent and guilty alike> I spent my first week reading the contract between the government entity and the prime contractor. That was pretty mind numbing (but turned out to be critical later on...) :-D Then one of my three managers walked into my cube and said .... "we have to have an electronic defect tracking tool on project X. We have to have it... [More]

At some point in time, every software application will go into maintenance where most of the software updates going forward are limited to minor enhancements and bug fixes. While often overlooked, maintenance is an integral part of most IT organizations. Studies have shown that some IT organizations spend as much as 75% of their overall software budgets on software maintenance . While many iT organizations have started using agile practices on projects, the projects usually are fixed iterations, between 2 to 4 weeks, use a single product... [More]

The question was asked: "Can you be Agile without doing TDD (test driven development)?" Credits: The original question as well as several excellent answers was posted on (programmers.stackexchange.com) . I encourage you to check those too. Short answer: Yes. Longer answer: In my experience, Agile is about picking the right level of Lean-ness for the project at hand. What do I mean by Lean-ness? And, why do I bring it into this answer? Lean does not mean chopping everything possible out of your method. As one of our... [More]

Much of the mainstream agile discussion focuses on the construction of straightforward systems by a small, co-located team working in a collaborative and self-organizing manner. Yet we know that there is more to software delivery than just construction, that many teams are neither small nor co-located, and that many teams are working on complex systems within a complex environment. The evidence that agile approaches result in improved time-to-market, improved quality, and improved developer productivity compel us to tailor agile strategies... [More]

We all know velocity to be the number of story points a team can successfully complete per sprint. Velocity is a thing of beauty. Let’s take a moment to ponder it. It predicts complexity delivered per sprint It predicts release dates It defines and defends a sustainable pace It binds scope It wards off evil vampires … project managers … oh! yes! strike ‘evil’ too. :-) It out performs industrial strengthened Earn Value Management Systems with a white board It and/or the lack of it, shows the health of Sprint Planning Some say it can jump... [More]

Mile High Agile 2012 The Agile Mile High event on April 3, 2012 in Denver, Colorado was a huge success. The conference was for agile practitioners at all levels of experience in the Denver region, including those exploring agile for the first time, This one-day action packed conference provides learning opportunities for agile novices, intermediates and experts, technical professionals, team leaders, managers, executives, and organizational change leaders. What was different about this event it is unlike National conferences that require a... [More]

Target roles: Product Owner and Scrum Master Let's talk about the flavors of velocity and the term 'velocity' itself. Complexity, Value, Risk, and ROI velocity are all important ways to understand how a team, sprint, and release are performing for the Product Owner. Velocity Types: Standard [Complexity] Velocity: Story points / sprint Value... [More]

Successful agile transformations often times require successful agile pilot projects. Often time a successful initial pilot is the most critical step early in a successful enterprise agile adoption. If the pilot project is a success then the organization has a tangible example to get behind but if the project fails (or just fails to meet expectations) then the entire agile initiative could be derailed by critics. Because no one really likes change unless they are driving it. Agile Pilot Selection Pilot selection is often the most critical... [More]